Caesar had the
people behind him, and Pompey the army. Unless in some way an apple of
discord could be thrown between them, the two favorites would overshadow
the State, and the Senate's authority would be gone. Nothing could be done
for the moment politically. Pompey owed his position to the democracy, and
he was too great as yet to fear Caesar as a rival in the Commonwealth. On
the personal side there was better hope. Caesar was as much admired in the
world of fashion as he was detested in the Curia. He had no taste for the
brutal entertainments and more brutal vices of male patrician society. He
preferred the companionship of cultivated women, and the noble lords had
the fresh provocation of finding their hated antagonist an object of
adoration to their wives and daughters. Here, at any rate, scandal had the
field to itself. Caesar was accused of criminal intimacy with many ladies
of the highest rank, and Pompey was privately informed that his friend had
taken advantage of his absence to seduce his wife, Mucia. Pompey was
Agamemnon; Caesar had been Aegisthus; and Pompey was so far persuaded that
Mucia had been unfaithful to him, that he divorced her before his return.
Charges of this kind have the peculiar advantage that even when disproved
or shown to be manifestly absurd, they leave a stain behind them.
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